Related papers: Mercenary punishment in structured populations

Exploiting others is beneficial individually but it could also be detrimental globally. The reverse is also true: a higher cooperation level may change the environment in a way that is beneficial for all competitors. To explore the possible…

Extortion strategies can dominate any opponent in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. But if players are able to adopt the strategies performing better, extortion becomes widespread and evolutionary unstable. It may sometimes act as a…

Understanding cooperative behavior in biological and social systems constitutes a scientific challenge, being the object of intense research over the past decades. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain the presence and persistence…

Autonomous agents that act with each other on behalf of humans are becoming more common in many social domains, such as customer service, transportation, and health care. In such social situations greedy strategies can reduce the positive…

Studying social dilemmas prompts the question of how cooperation can emerge in situations where individuals are expected to act selfishly. Here, in the framework of the one-shot Public Goods Game (PGG), we introduce the concept that…

We consider a game-theoretic model where individuals compete over a shared failure-prone system or resource. We investigate the effectiveness of a taxation mechanism in controlling the utilization of the resource at the Nash equilibrium…

We study the evolution of cooperation in the collective-risk social dilemma game, where the risk is determined by a collective target that must be reached with individual contributions. All players initially receive endowments from the…

We study the role of imitation within a model of economics with adaptive agents. The basic ingredients are those of the Minority Game. We add the possibility of local information exchange and imitation of the neighbour's strategy. Imitators…

The lack of cooperation can easily result in inequality among members of a society, which provides an increasing gap between individual incomes. To tackle this issue, we introduce an incentive mechanism based on individual strategies and…

We introduce and study a model of an interacting population of agents who collaborate in groups which compete for limited resources. Groups are formed by random matching agents and their worth is determined by the sum of the efforts…

In the framework of evolutionary games with institutional reciprocity, limited incentives are at disposal for rewarding cooperators and punishing defectors. In the simplest case, it can be assumed that, depending on their strategies, all…

In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…

It is known that a player in a noncooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that…

Taxation constitutes a fundamental component of modern national economic systems, exerting profound impacts on both societal functioning and governmental operations. In this paper, we employ an interdependent network approach to model the…

We study the evolutionary dynamics of the prisoner's dilemma game in which cooperators and defectors interact with another actor type called exiters. Rather than being exploited by defectors, exiters exit the game in favour of a small…

The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people they will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle with profound implications. Cooperation is linked to altruism, the capacity to perform costly…

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game that produces many counter-intuitive and complex behaviors in a social environment, based on very simple basic rules. It illustrates that cooperation can be a good thing even in a competitive world,…

In spatial evolutionary games the fitness of each individual is traditionally determined by the payoffs it obtains upon playing the game with its neighbors. Since defection yields the highest individual benefits, the outlook for cooperators…

In this paper, we rigorously study the problem of cost optimisation of hybrid (mixed) institutional incentives, which are a plan of actions involving the use of reward and punishment by an external decision-maker, for maximising the level…

Motivated by the fact that the same social dilemma can be perceived differently by different players, we here study evolutionary multigames in structured populations. While the core game is the weak prisoner's dilemma, a fraction of the…